A Book About the Theater - Brander Matthews

THE UTILITY OF THE VARIETY-SHOW
I

In an advertisement issued by one of the huge department stores of New York not long ago, the assertion was made that the house had on sale "all the new novelties." A purist in language might be moved to protest that this proclamation was plainly tautological, because it is the essential quality of every novelty to be new. But even a purist in language, if he happens also to be an honest observer of things as they are, would be forced to admit that his supercilious cavil had only a superficial justification, since, as a matter of fact, there are many novelties which are not new, and which, indeed, are venerably ancient. It was Solomon, superabundantly married, and therefore in an excellent position to acquire wisdom, who declared that there is nothing new under the sun. Wireless telegraphy is only a development of the signaling by beacon-fires, which was practised by the Greeks and which they employed to convey immediately to Greece the glad tidings of the fall of Troy; and moving-pictures are only an ingenious amplification of the zoëtrope of our childhood.

The amusement-parks which sprang up all over the United States in the early part of the twentieth century, in imitation of those at Coney Island, bear an undeniable resemblance to the Foire Saint Laurent and to the other fairs of Paris in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and even the loud-voiced crier who proclaims the merits of the several side-shows, and who is now known as a "barker," bears a name which is only a translation of that given to his forbears two hundred years ago in France—aboyeur.

The so-called cabaret-shows, prevalent in the larger cities of the United States in the winter of 1911-1912, were hailed as the very latest form of amusement, combining as they did the solid pleasures of the table with the ethereal delights of song-and-dance; and yet Froissart is a witness that something very like the cabaret-show was known in the Middle Ages, and Gibbon has recorded its existence nearly a thousand years earlier, at the court of Theodoric. Indeed, the Romans, and the Greeks before them, had employed performers of one sort or another to relieve the monotony of their banquets. Gaditanian dancers were popular thruout the wide realm of Rome, almost two thousand years before Carmencita came from Cadiz to warble and caper at midnight in the studios of American painters, just before and just after the guests had enjoyed the refreshments provided by their artistic hosts.

As the cabaret-show is only another form of the well-known "vaudeville supper," it must be relegated to the class of novelties which are not new. And vaudeville itself is only the long familiar variety-show. It may now be called by a new name, and many of those who do not look behind a label may accept it as a new thing; nevertheless it is very old, indeed. The name "vaudeville" is an absurd misnomer, like so many other terms due to our habit of careless borrowing from other tongues. In French vaudeville originally designated a kind of topical song, bristling with pointed gibes at the follies of the moment; and then in time it took on another meaning, when it was used to describe a light and lively farce interspersed with occasional lyrics set to old-fashioned tunes. It is impossible to say just how and why this French word, which had two distinct meanings in its own language, should have been imported into English to characterize improperly a form of amusement which we had long known by the admirably exact name of variety-show. The French themselves call their own type of variety-show, at which refreshments are served, a café-concert. Their nickname for it is a beuglant, a place where there is "howling"—which seems to imply that they do not expect too much melody from the singers, who appear at these performances. In England an establishment of this kind is called a music-hall; and it was more than half a century ago that Planché described their blatant lyrics set to brazen tunes as "most music-hall, most melancholy."

Whatever its name may be in the different parts of the world, the entertainment is much the same. The most frequent item on the program is the comic song, often accompanied by a rudimentary dance. Sometimes it is in the martial staccato of Paulus's 'En revenant de la révue' which boosted General Boulanger into a furious but fleeting political popularity. Sometimes it is the coonful melody of 'Under the Bamboo Tree' or 'Dinah, the Moon am Shining.' Sometimes it is an almost epileptic lyric, like 'Tarara-boom-de-ay.' Sometimes a singer of a more delicate art, like Yvette Guilbert, ventures upon songs of a more subtly sentimental appeal. There may be a swift succession of solos, male singers and female alternating, those of the most fame appearing latest, as is the practise in the first part of the Parisian open-air café-chantant, the Alcazar or the Ambassadeurs. There may be duets or trios or quartets, serious or comic, decorously unadorned or diversified by dancing. There may be songs to be interpreted by half a dozen performers, accompanied by more or less dramatic action, like the 'Mulligan Guards,' which was the simple germ wherefrom sprouted the long series of more and more elaborate Harrigan and Hart plays, delineating with keen insight and with sympathetic humor the manifold aspects of tenement-house life in New York, and possessing a rich flavor of fun curiously akin to that which amuses us in the plays wherein Plautus had sketched the tenement-house life in Rome two thousand years ago.

While the song and the song-and-dance and the song-and-parade may be the staple of the entertainment, the variety-show justifies its name by the medley of other exhibitions it presents. It delights in the dance unaccompanied by the song; and in some of the English music-halls, the Alhambra and the Empire in London, the ballet is the foremost attraction, providing an opportunity for the display of her dainty art to so exquisite a dancer as Mlle. Genée. In New York it is now a refuge for the waifs and strays of vanishing negro-minstrelsy. It is ready to welcome the wandering conjurer and the strolling juggler. It extends its hospitality to the acrobat, single or in groups, throwing flipflaps on the stage, flying thru the air on a trapeze or diving into the water in a tank. It acts as host to the trainer of performing animals, dogs and cats, seals and elephants. It lends its stage to the puppet-show performer, to the sidewalk conversationalist, and to the ventriloquist, with his pair of stolid figures seemingly seated uncomfortably on his knees and actually supported by his hands, while his adroit fingers manipulate their mechanical mouths.

Of late, the variety-show has accepted the aid of the exhibitors of moving-pictures, just as the exhibitors of moving-pictures have invoked the casual assistance of song-and-dance teams and of other vaudeville performers to relieve the strain on the eyes of their spectators. And the introduction of the cinematograph, or the bioscope, or whatever it may be called, is, perhaps, the only real novelty in our latter-day variety-show. All the other performers are presenting feats of a kind known to our remote ancestors, even if these feats are now more skilfully presented. Animals were put thru their paces hundreds of years ago; and performing dogs and educated bears figure frequently in the illuminations which decorate many a medieval manuscript. There were tight-rope dancers in Alexandria and in Byzantium; there were contortionists in Rome and in Greece, and the flexibility of these latter is preserved for us in the vase-paintings which have been replevined from the ashes of Pompeii and the lava of Herculaneum. Quintillian tells us of the wonderful feats of certain performers on the stage in his day, "with balls, and of other jugglers whose dexterity is such that one might suppose the things which they throw from them to return of their own accord, and to fly wheresoever they are commanded." The art of modern magic has enlarged its boundaries by the aid of the modern sciences of mechanics and physics, but elementary sleights-of-hand were known to a remote antiquity, and savages always had their medicine-men and their marabouts, workers of primitive wonders to strike awe into the souls of their unsophisticated beholders. The variety-show may have the variety it vaunts itself as possessing; but to novelty it can lay little claim.